Apple is preparing to release a new version of its high-end Mac Pro computer in Blighty almost a year after Eurocrats banned the sale of a previous model.
A shipping date has been set for the new Mac Pro, which is the only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading. The Pro is aimed at business customers who need …

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The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

I know we can't expect Mr Hammill to be funny, insightful, entertaining, or or in any way useful except for adding somebody else's shopworn catchphrases to a regurgitated press release, but he could at least attempt to be factually correct.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

Mac Minis are rather more upgradable than the new Mac Pros, actually. About the only device you can upgrade on the Mac Pro appears to be the RAM. Everything else uses a custom connector, including the storage and GPUs.

On Mac Minis, you can upgrade the RAM and HDD. CPU - well, arguably, on both, as they both use normal sockets as I recall but the usual concerns about TDP make it all a bit sketchier AFAIK.

Otherwise, they share the same Thunderbolt bus as the rest of the Mac range (the exception being that the Pro has six, rather than one).

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

GPU's - I am told the idea is that external GPU boxes will be avaliable via Thunderbolt. While messy this might be quite interesting as you could have an external box containing several graphics cards in parallel. For 4K video processing this could be a real boon. Instead of handing NVIDIA 800 quid for their underwhelming Quadro, you could have 2 or more consumer GPU's working in parallel.

Memory - Do you have a source for the memory being upgradable? Last I heard it was soldered onto the board just like a Macbook.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

Solid state disk. These come with drive electronics which the PCI flash doesn't require and is therefore a different component. It doesn't connect to the disk system it connects direct to the CPU via the PCI bus at far greater speed than SAS can manage and therefore also could offer higher IOPS.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

It might show up as a logical drive but that doesn't mean it's a "disk". This is much closer to a FusionIO board than a disk which is why Apple specked it. The lack of understanding on this forum is because PC people don't understand the difference and so assume an SSD is comparable storage which it is most certainly not. Transfer speed is higher, latency lower and IOPS higher than SSD. This also has the knock on effect that less memory is required and even less CPU since it's not locked in a wait state all the time.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

Go to an Apple store and look. They say it's PCIe 2 and it looks like a 2 lane PCIe connector. The many stories of "custom" connectors are likely from people expecting SAS connectors who didn't read the spec.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

Lusty, yes it's a PCI-e device, but it's not a standard PCI-E connector (m.2) - it's Apples own proprietary connector, keyings and pinouts. If you try to connect a standard PCI-E SSD to it, it won't fit. That's the definition of proprietary; custom for no reason other than vendor lock in.

There's a reason that every single tech site under the sun describes it as proprietary or custom - they all know what M.2 looks like, this ain't it, and Apple are the only people using it.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

It looks like you're right, although the one in the Pro looked to me just like a regular PCIe slot but it's too short for a x4 connector (I thought it was a x2). It could be that they have just put 2 lanes on either side to keep the size down but either way it's different. I suspect that anyone buying this won't be bothered by expensive flash, after all the equivalent HP part is €1400 for a 410GB flash drive (FusionIO PCIe).

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

Fusion IO boards are incredibly overpriced compared to a RAIDed set of 6G SATA SSDs. We've testeed precisely that and both IOPs and bandwidth were better with the SATA RAID. What was this magic PCIe special sauce again?

Apple made the right choice going with PCIe, but let's not pretend that changing your flash disk interface is some huge quantum performance leap. The flash itself just isn't that fast.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

It's fast enough to saturate 6Gbps SAS interfaces. It's fast enough that I saturated 2 16Gbps FC interfaces with a Violin memory box. Since every block can be accessed effectively as fast as the interface can throw the data as long as the controller keeps up I think it actually does give a huge performance leap. Not quantum though, that means tiny :)

Re: The only fruity computer which allows any sort of upgrading.

For what it's worth I just tested using SQLIO inside a Windows VM on my rMBP using an 8GB test file, 2 threads, 128K sequential write for 5 minutes I sustained just under 5GB/s (40Gb/s) at 36k IOPS which the 6Gb/s (750MB/s) SAS is simply not capable of. The rMBP uses 4 PCIe lanes of 2GB/s each for the controller, so you were right that the flash cannot keep up with this interface but definitely wrong that it isn't better than SAS. Mine is the 512GB module.

A landmark moment in Apple history

With the new Mac Pro, this is the first time in the whole history of Apple that they're flogging a computer that isn't internally accessorizable*. Given that most people don't fiddle with their computers internally, I don't think that this will hurt the bottom line much - but I like mucking about inside my machine, so I don't see myself replacing my trusty last generation Mac Pro any time soon.

*I'm defining upgradable as improvements to what you already have, and accessorizable as augmenting what you already have - expansion cards, additional storage and so forth.

Re: A landmark moment in Apple history

Re: A landmark moment in Apple history

Yeah. See what you did there. You conflated 'Most Users' with 'Most Pro Users'. Actually, even 'Most Pro Users' is a woolly definition. I would say that graphic designers, scientists, video editors and so forth, who demand vastly powerful CPUs, count as Pro users. Most of these don't want to augment their machines internally.

If by Pro users you mean hackers, programmers, sys-admins and wannabe IT pros, then yes. Most of these demand internal augmentation. We are, however, the minority.

Not falling for the hype

On the upside it's very powerful. On the downside the only way to expand it is with external Thunderbolt devices.

Some of us bought Mac Pros to fill them with hard disks (all 4 of my bays are full + have 2 DVD writers). The new Mac Pro will not let you upgrade either the boot hard drive or the memory.

As someone who had upgraded his boot hard drive twice since 2008 and also purchased all barring the very base spec of memory from Crucial, I'm not very impressed by this. Not least because you are forced into buying at Apple prices for more memory and hard disk space instead of doing what people used to do and buying the base spec and upgrading 3rd party. Seen to recall £150 being the figure I saved just buy buying my memory from Crucial!

At least they are suggesting that graphics cards upgrades might be upgradable via Thunderbolt. Small blessings!

I get the feeling that if I buy one it will end up looking like my old Amstrad CPC 6128 with expansions hanging off of every port and cables everywhere! So much for new improved sexier design. Nice and neat providing you don't plug anything into it!

Re: Not falling for the hype

My friend is buying one soon, and he isn't bothered for a moment by the inability to add harddisk space. This might be because his workflow (video production, 3D rendered motion graphics etc) is exactly what this machine is designed for. Its a tool that will save him time, allowing him to earn more money.

He'll shunt current projects to the internal SSD from a cabinet of external redundant storage via ethernet or Thunderbolt, and back out again as required.

Re: Not falling for the hype

That's still 60 dollars which probably works out at about 60 quid given the usual pricing on these items. Still an amount of money I might wish to save given the trivial effort involved if you have the old chassis. Indeed in terms of servicing the old Mac Pro is one of the nicest chassis I've worked in outside of high end servers. Even the bits you aren't supposed to get at (e.g. the wireless card) are a doddle.

Re: Not falling for the hype

As Dave126 says, I think the expectation is most users will be working with massive datasets and files - big project files that are stored on a NAS/SAN, not on the local box.

Have enough storage locally and the rest will be stored separately, with lots of external connectivity for BMD stuff, Red Rocket boxes, 4K/8K/16K graphics cards as required. A fair few PCIe breakout boxes are popping up with a thunderbolt cable hanging off a box containing one or two double-width PCIe slots and a chunky PSU. Self contained in that it doesn't affect the cooling or power drain on the Mac Pro.

As others have mentioned, if your Mac Pro fails, or you go on the road with a laptop, being able to simply unplug your TB chassis and move your Red Rocket / [insert other expansion here] over to the MacBook is incredibly useful.

RAM

I hope he realises the new Mac Pro maxes out at 64GB of RAM which will put a severe crimp on doing anything memory-intensive. The older Mac Pro boxes could go as high as 96GB I think and the server-level Hackintosh community believe OS/X has a hard 128GB RAM limit as they have problems running it on anything with more memory (not a problem with Windows 8 though).

Re: RAM

>Perhaps its different when you are spending someone else's cash?

No, it's his money; he's the MD of his own video production / motion graphics company. He has done the sums, and is buying one. Since his business has grown steadily since he started it, I'm inclined to believe he knows what he is doing.

>I hope he realises the new Mac Pro maxes out at 64GB of RAM which will put a severe crimp on doing anything memory-intensive.

Not really. He currently uses the older Mac Pros and a 32 GB Hackintosh, and hasn't come close to running into RAM limits. His workflow is mainly video - compositing, editing, colour grading etc - but also ray-trace rendering of 3D models and compositing the results into the above. RAM is just not the current bottle neck, and again, he knows what he is doing.

It is not the machine for me - I'm a PC based CAD jockey. My level of CAD work just doesn't require the extreme storage IO that video work does, and intensive tasks like rendering can be distributed across any CPUs/GPUs across the network.

Re: RAM

Re: Not falling for the hype

"Some of us bought Mac Pros to fill them with hard disks (all 4 of my bays are full + have 2 DVD writers). The new Mac Pro will not let you upgrade either the boot hard drive or the memory."

What you appear to have missed though is that even if you used 16Gbps FC to add disk to the old one it would not have been as fast as using the full Thunderbolt capability in the new Pro. Since you appear to have added disk internally probably with SCSI or SAS that would suggest you either don't understand disk performance or just needed capacity. In either case a NAS is the modern way to achieve what you have done while a SAN would be the way to achieve high performance if you decide you need that. Nobody with up to date knowledge would think of upgrading a machine in this class with internal drives for anything other than system disk which is upgradable on the Pro. Using Thunderbolt you could even add external PCI flash if you wanted to.

FFS

I agree. The old Mac Pros let you have internal raid arrays, any expansion cards of your choice etc etc. This new one relies on thunderbolt, and you can't even place those external devices on top of the computer case!

The requirements for "pro" users who can fork out the cash for this are very very different. Most will need the ability to customise the setup. Maybe not right away, but in a year or two. So you are limited to Thunderbolt only (which hasn't been adopted by a lot of manufacturers), can't upgrade a lot...

The Mac Pro is totally flawed. They were looking at people with Macbooks and iPhones and forgot that "Pro" is a different league with different requirements. The "sexy" bit is debatable. My guess is this will be the last Mac Pro.

I think the shift that you're missing is that once you decouple the 'expansion chassis' from the computer you can use a number of different his machines to drive your fixed peripherals. I would expect to see multiple TB2 interfaces on the next MacBookPro.

>I think the shift that you're missing is that once you decouple the 'expansion chassis' from the computer you can use a number of different his machines to drive your fixed peripherals.

Indeed. Since some of those expansion cards cost upwards of £2000, being able to use the same card in a thunderbolt chassis in the studio with a Mac Pro, as well as with a Macbook when shooting video on site is very useful.

Should a host machine go belly-up, a new machine can be swapped in more easily.